So, my sig lies, I haven't had this overclocked since I instlaled windows 7 and now that it seems stable (as stable as a non release version of windows can be) I'm going to start overclocking again... but this time foregoing the conservative 333 fsb and hoping for 400 which would be about 3.6ghz

Thing is though... is this realistic for the C2Q series? I see it alot on the dual cores (and up to 4ghz) but i don't see many people pushing the quad to those speeds.

And before you have to ask, yes it has pretty good cooling. I'm still using a Zalman 7700cu (remember those)... the same one that graced my Opteron 165 (1.8ghz @ 2.6ghz) for more than 3 years.

Anyway, I'm excited to try this out again.... what's the key stuff you guys use for testing stability? is prime95 + ati tool the defacto stability testers still?

and one more thing... what's a "high" voltage for these? 1.325 is stock and I've seen people push theirs up to 1.4 but it just seems quite high to me....

My VID is 1.2500V and my Q6600 G0 is currently OC'ed to the speed in my sig! It is very relaistic... but keep in mind your memory might hold you back... I had to move to the RAM in my sig from the 4 sticks of DD2-800 I had before. Could have been to much stress on the NB or just crappy ram. Either way... I managed 3.7Ghz stable on this rig, but it ran pretty hot so I took it down to the speed I have listed now Good luck and keep us posted! I run Orthos and max out all cores that way by setting the affinity of that program instance for the 4 cores on the CPU.

400x9 is not stable, i haven't investigated if it's voltage or what but I think that's what it would be unless the processor can't handle that fsb speed because 400x8 wasn't very stable either.

intel's speedstep is crap....

and @ the comment about my memory... it should be fine if it's in a 1:1 ratio at 400mhz right.... I see no reason why that would hold me back if it's at the "stock" memory speed unless there's a relationship I'm not aware of. But yes, I do plan on going to a 1:1 relationship for the memory with the 400 fsb.

so it sounds like 1.45v is the high end of the spectrum for voltage?

Also I'm pretty confident in this heatsink... is there any reason I shouldn't be? I know the 95xx series from zalman was the "new high end" back in like '05 after I bought this... but have things really changed that much since then?

Well it's pretty decent cooling.... better than stock I'm sure but I'm not quite sure how it stacks up now-days against the big name heatsinks

Zalman 7700cu

all copper - flowery heatsink... not heatpipes but before this tower - heatpipe era dawned it was top dog. it's also the big 120mm fan version so it pumps a good amoutn of air...

Just one thing though... what are you guys using to monitor cpu temps? I used to use motherboard monitor because it had the nice little tray feature but now that I'm running 4 cores I'd like to see the breakdown of the actual core temps... I was using speedfan before but the fluctation in core temps made me weary of it's accuracy.